Katie Couric and Yahoo News parted ways on Friday after four years of Couric serving as the organization's global news anchor.

Couric's headlining interview show for Yahoo News has been canceled. Her $10 million contract ended
in March 2017 and was renewed through June. Couric will continue
working with Yahoo News and its corporate parent Oath on a
project-by-project basis.

"Over the last four years, Katie has created a vast portfolio of work
that has been equal parts inspiring, thought-provoking and fun to
watch," an Oath spokesperson told Recode. "We're proud of everything she has accomplished and look forward to exploring ways to work together in the future."

Couric's four-year tenure was marred by criticism she received in the
wake of revelations she and her fellow filmmakers deceptively edited an
interview with gun rights activists in their 2016 Under the Gun
film. In that film, a group of activists with the Virginia Citizens
Defense League are shown sitting in silence for nine seconds following a
question from Couric about terrorism and background checks. However,
raw audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows several of the activists immediately responded to Couric's question.

Don Hall was sitting in his living room watching TV with
his girlfriend about 9:30 p.m. earlier this year when he was startled
by flashing police car lights in his driveway.

Hall met the Oneida County sheriff’s deputies in the driveway, worried that they were bringing bad news about a family member.

Instead, the deputies produced an official document demanding that
Hall, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran who is a retired pipefitter, turn
over his guns to them on the spot. On the document Hall said he was
described as “mentally defective.”

When Hall told police he’d never had any mental issues, Hall said,
deputies told him he must have done something that triggered the order
under the New York state’s SAFE Act.

The deputies left that night with six guns – two handguns and four long guns.

This might be the most racist commercial any company has ever produced.

A more than two-minute video produced by Procter & Gamble, the
company that manufactures Cascade, Febreze, Mr. Clean, Tide, Swiffer,
Downy and a plethora of products, shows various scenes of black parents
talking with their children about racism.

The ad, titled “The Talk,” shows scenes of black parents, spanning
generations, telling their kids about how the system is stacked against
them, how racist white people are and teaching them to fear the police.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul said he spoke to President
Donald Trump by phone about healthcare reform on Monday and told the
president he thought Trump had the authority to create associations that
would allow organizations to offer group health insurance plans.

Paul,
a Republican, told reporters that Trump was considering taking some
form of executive action to address problems with the healthcare system
after the Senate failed last week to pass a measure to reform the
system.

Allowing groups like AARP, which
represents retirees, to form health associations could enable
individuals and small businesses to form larger groups to negotiate with
health insurance companies for lower rates.

“Can you imagine the leverage you would get for drug prices and
insurance prices if you were negotiating for 5 million people?” Paul
said.

“If you could legalize that, not only could it fix some of
the problems that we are encountering in the individual market, there's
28 million people without insurance because it's too expensive. What if
we forced the price down enough.”

On Monday afternoon, John Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, made his first major staffing decision, forcing out the White House
communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, after less than two weeks on
the job. The move was unexpected. President Trump had issued no public statements criticizing Scaramucci for a series of obscenity-laced
statements he made to me last Wednesday night, which accused the former
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus of leaking to reporters and,
without offering any evidence, committing a felony.

While we've carefully documented the dynamics in play behind Trump's decision to end
the CIA's covert Syria program, as well as the corresponding fury this
immediately unleashed among the usual hawkish DC policy wonks, new information on what specifically impacted the president's thinking has emerged.

Thomas Joscelyn, a Middle East analyst for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explains in the August edition of The Weekly Standard:

Earlier
this year, President Donald Trump was shown a disturbing video of
Syrian rebels beheading a child near the city of Aleppo. It had caused a minor stir in the press as the fighters belonged to the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a group that had been supported by the CIA as part of its rebel aid program.

The footage is haunting. Five bearded men smirk as they surround a
boy in the back of a pickup truck. One of them holds the boy’s head with
a tight grip on his hair while another mockingly slaps his face. Then,
one of them uses a knife to saw the child’s head off and holds it up in
the air like a trophy. It is a scene reminiscent of the Islamic State’s
snuff videos, except this wasn’t the work of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men.
The murderers were supposed to be the good guys: our allies.

Trump pressed his most senior intelligence advisers, asking the basic
question of how the CIA could have a relationship with a group that
beheads a child and then uploads the video to the internet. He wasn't
satisfied with any of the responses:

Trump
wanted to know why the United States had backed Zenki if its members
are extremists. The issue was discussed at length with senior
intelligence officials, and no good answers were forthcoming, according
to people familiar with the conversations. After learning more
worrisome details about the CIA’s ghost war in Syria—including that
U.S.-backed rebels had often fought alongside extremists, among them al
Qaeda’s arm in the country—the president decided to end the program
altogether.

The Senate leader is being pilloried in an Alabama special election as
the hated symbol of the establishment — and he's responding in force.

Mitch McConnell is unleashing the full force of his political machine
in an all-out push to stop two far-right conservatives who threaten to
make his life miserable in the Senate.

The Republican leader is aiming to thwart Rep. Mo Brooks and former
state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore in a special election in
Alabama next month. Both men are campaigning against McConnell as a
despised symbol of the establishment — and both would exacerbate his
already stiff challenge wrangling his GOP Conference.

McConnell is responding in kind. His super PAC is set to spend as
much as $8 million to boost his favored candidate, recently appointed
Republican Sen. Luther Strange. McConnell has activated his sprawling
donor network and pressed the White House for more resources. And the
National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP campaign arm
McConnell controls, has warned consultants they'll be cut off from
future work if they assist Strange’s opponents.

Trump haters come in all shapes and
sizes but one belief they all seem to hold in common is that the
temerity of the American people in electing Donald Trump will lead, as night follows day, to a constitutional crisis.

What
they missed is that the crisis is already here and it’s been brewing
for years. It’s just not the one they’re looking for and, contrary to
what Left wing commentators would say, Trump isn’t the cause of the
crisis, he is the response to it.

The
swaggering outsider who promises to break-up the ruling cartel wasn’t
supposed to win. How could he? But he did and that’s just not fair so
they want to invoke the heckler’s veto that would overturn the last
election — feel free to vote all
you want, but if you elect someone unacceptable to the ruling class they
will unite to destroy him and the people around him. Refusal to abide
by election results is what creates a constitutional crisis.

This week, I drew the assignment of shooting a light weight .50 BMG. For
those who aren’t familiar with this powerhouse cartridge — the .50 BMG
and light do not belong in the same sentence — certainly if you also
include single-shot or bolt-action.

After decades of destroying jobs, manufacturing, religion, culture,
tradition and livelihood the Democrat Party was stunned in 2016 to
discover Americans weren’t buying their lies about supporting the Middle
Class in America.

The DNC recently published a survey of Middle Class voters after months of blaming Russia for their stunning loss in November.

It’s worse than they thought.

By a staggering 35 point margin Middle Class voters now understand they have a better chance with Republicans on the economy and creating jobs.

Reince Priebus learned a hard lesson
over the past six months and Americans should pay attention to it.
After leaving his job as White House chief of staff last week, Priebus
told Sean Hannity that the national press is flat-out "dishonest."

"What I find to be amazing is how narratives are set and a lot of it is not true. ...The most breathtaking thing for me has been the difference between what the truth is and what often gets reported."

Priebus was referring to story lines that have taken deep root in the anti-Trump media.
The most prominent one is that Russia and the Trump campaign worked together to sabotage Hillary Clinton's
presidential run. Hundreds of stories have run bolstering that theory;
many of them driven by rank speculation and the use of anonymous sources
that are clearly opposed to Trump.

President Trump will present his first Medal of Honor as
commander-in-chief Monday – to a 71-year-old Vietnam vet who was injured
while saving his comrades as an Army medic.

James McCloughan entered the “kill zone” during the Battle of Hui Yon
Hill in 1969 to rescue his fellow soldiers and was struck by shrapnel
from a rocket-propelled grenade.

In its announcement last month,
the White House said McCloughan “voluntarily risked his life on nine
separate occasions to rescue wounded and disoriented comrades.

He suffered wounds from shrapnel and small arms fire on three
separate occasions, but refused medical evacuation to stay with his
unit, and continued to brave enemy fire to rescue, treat, and defend
wounded Americans.”

Now 71 and living in South Haven, Michigan, McCloughan last month said the battle was “the worst two days of my life.”

The Trump administration is considering the ramifications of paring
back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan as part of its ongoing strategy
review in America’s longest war, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Trump’s national security cabinet is bitterly divided
on the future U.S. role in Afghanistan. Senior national security
officials like Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security
Advisor H.R. McMaster are reportedly pushing Trump to allow a surge of
approximately 4,000 troops into Afghanistan, while White House Chief
Strategist Steve Bannon has lobbied against the effort.

“It doesn’t work unless we are there for a long time, and if we don’t
have the appetite to be there a long time, we should just leave. It’s
an unanswered question,” a senior administration official told WSJ
of any plan to increase U.S. troops. “It is becoming clearer and
clearer to people that those are the options: go forward with something
like the strategy we have developed, or withdraw.”

Grace wanted to do selfies in the middle of my walk. Amazing girl who at 17 ( last year) was diagnosed with liver cancer. She never looked back or thought for a moment she wouldn't overcome it. Given an experimental drug, she was cancer free at the end of the treatment and free again on her six month checkup. Grace received her name from her parents after conceiving her five years after the doctors told her parents that there was no hope of them every having a baby. The Lord works in mysterious ways, as my Mother would say.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

The table below summarizes Federal Tax revenues and spending for
twenty years following the Civil War. For clarity, the total period is
separated into four discrete five-year intervals. As may be observed,
more than half of Federal tax revenues were applied to three items: (1)
Federal debt interest, (2) budget surpluses, and (3) veterans benefits.
Although compelled to pay their share of taxes to fund them, Southerners
derived no benefit from the allocations. They essentially represented a
form of reparations for being on the losing side. Nor were they the
only form.

History records that the first colony to legally establish slavery was Massachusetts, the Puritans of New England enslaved the Pequot Indians [including children] who resisted their invasions; by 1750 Rhode Island had surpassed Liverpool as the center of the transatlantic slave trade; Yankee notions and rum were traded in Africa for those already enslaved; Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney’s gin transformed cotton production in 1793; Manhattan banks supplied easy credit after the Louisiana Purchase opened the western lands to slave-produced cotton; and cotton-hungry New England mills were fed from that new land. It is then easy to see the source of slavery’s perpetuation and it clearly points to those who could have easily ended that relic of the British colonial system.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com The Great American Political Divide

Reaping the Economic Benefits of Slavery

“The superabundance of land to which the English colonists, from Adam Smith downwards, attribute the prosperity of new colonies, has never led to great prosperity without some kind of slavery. The States of New England, in which Negro slavery [was permitted], form no exception to the general rule.

[Though] the Puritans and followers of [William] Penn, who founded to colonies of New England, flourished with superabundance of land and without [a great number of] Negro slaves, they did not flourish without slavery . . . [though] they were led to carry on an extensive traffic in white men and children, who, kidnapped in Europe, were virtually sold to these fastidious colonists, and treated by them as slaves.

Even so lately as the last twenty years, and especially during the last war between England and America . . . vast numbers of poor Germans were decoyed to those States which forbid slavery, and there sold for long terms of years to the highest bidder at public auction. Though white and free in name, they were really not free to become independent landowners, and therefore it was possible to employ their labor constantly and in combination.

A black man never was, nor is he now, treated as a man by the white men of New England. There, where the most complete equality subsists among white men, and every white man is taught to respect himself as well as other white men, black men are treated as it they were horses or dogs . . .

In another way, the States which [abolished] slavery have gained by it immensely without any corresponding evil. The great fishing establishments of the [New England] colonies were set up for the purpose of supplying the slaves of the West Indies, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, commodities which have never been raised on any large scale in America except by the combined labor of slaves.

A great part of the commerce . . . of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, has always consisted of a carrying trade for the Southern States . . . At the present time, which is the great market for the surplus of farmers in the non-slaveholding States on the western rivers? New Orleans. And how could that market exist without slavery? Capitalists again, natives of the States which forbid slavery, reside during part of every year in the slave States, and reap large profits by dealing in rice, sugar and cotton, exchangeable commodities, which, it must be repeated, have never been raised to any extent in America except by the labor of slaves.

The States, therefore, which [abolished] slavery, having reaped the economic benefits of slavery, without incurring the chief of its moral evils, seem to be more indebted to it than the slave States. If those who [abolished] slavery within their own legal jurisdiction should also resolve to have no intercourse or concern with slave-owners, to do nothing for them, and to exchange nothing with them, we should see an economical revolution in America . . .

It is evident that the most Southern States of the Union cannot abolish slavery without incurring great dangers, which the North had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population . . . [and were] gradually introduced into the society . . .

The Northern States had nothing to fear [as the] blacks were few in number . . . But if the faint dawn of freedom were to show two millions of men their true position, the oppressors had reason to tremble.

And as soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two foreign communities, it will be readily understood that there are but two chances for the future: the Negroes and the whites must either wholly part, or wholly mingle.”

(Selections from the Economic History of the United States, 1765-1860, Guy Stevens Callender, (original 1909) Reprints of Economic Classics, 1965, excerpts, pp. 793-799)

The University of Iowa’s student newspaper has announced the
discovery of a special privilege which intelligent people acquire as an
accident of birth. This new privilege — called “cognitive privilege” —
functions in essentially the same way as white privilege.

Garden-variety white privilege “is an important topic that deserves a
public discussion,” the op-ed on “cognitive privilege” explains, but it
is also “prudent to at least mention the wider concept contained
therein: that of privilege itself.”

Privilege in general is “the receipt of certain benefits wholly
through accident of birth and it is “undeniable that privilege itself is
a reality,” the student newspaper explains.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) on Friday called for the
repeal of the 17th Amendment and the return to senators selected by
state legislatures after the Senate GOP's effort to repeal and replace
ObamaCare died in a late-night vote.

The 17th Amendment was
ratified in 1913 and established the popular election of senators.
Previously, senators were elected by state legislatures.

During their time supposedly working on the Hill, one in the group was running a car dealership. Another worked at at McDonald’s until
he was fired, at which point he sat home all day, his housemate told
TheDCNF. A third of the IT troop was a 20-year old college student, and
multiple members of the group spent months at a time in Pakistan.

Imran Awan, a congressional aide arrested by the FBI after wiring
$300,000 to Pakistan and misrepresenting the purpose, had previously
wired money to the Muslim country and was frantically liquidating
multiple real estate properties on the day he was arrested, The Daily
Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.

Imran’s real estate properties provide a source of money that could
be sent directly to Pakistan when two upcoming home sales close.
Prosecutors have since filed paperwork saying they fear “the dissipation
of the proceeds of the fraud and destruction of evidence in other
locations.”

Imran was arrested July 24 — four months after the FBI says his wife
Hina Alvi moved to Pakistan after learning the family was the subject of
a criminal investigation into their work as IT administrators for House
Democrats. On the day of Imran’s arrest, the couple accepted a buyer
for one house owned by Hina with an asking price of $618,000 (Hawkshead Dr.) and listed another property for sale at $200,000 (Pembrook Village), real estate records show.

Judicial Watch today announced
that it filed three separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits
against the U.S. Department of Justice seeking records for current FBI
Acting Director Andrew McCabe relating to his political activities,
travel vouchers, and employment status. The first two lawsuits
specifically seek records of McCabe’s political activities involving his
wife’s failed campaign for political office and interactions with
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

Any and all records of communication between FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and other FBI or Department of Justice (“DOJ”) officials regarding, concerning or relating to ethical issues concerning the involvement of Andrew McCabe and/or his wife, Dr. Jill McCabe, in political campaigns;

Any and all records related to ethical guidance concerning political activities provided to Deputy Director McCabe by FBI and/or DOJ officials or elements.

Here's part of President Donald Trump's speech in Poland: "The
fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to
survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any
cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?
Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in
the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"

After this
speech, which was warmly received by Poles, the president encountered
predictable criticism. Most of the criticism reflected gross ignorance
and dishonesty.

Remembrance

To die for one’s country is not only an act of bravery, it is THE act of bravery. For soldiers, it is just an extension of their military career, a part of their duty. As leaders have asked their soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the good of the society, it is only right for leaders to go through the same motion. They should practice what they have preached.

As war is seen as a noble act, tu sat serves as redemption in case of defeat. It is also a way to tell the enemy: “You might have won the battle/war but you don’t deserve to win because you don’t have the chinh nghia (just cause).” And it is not only just cause: it is the moral belief that the cause they are fighting for deserves their total sacrifice. Continues below

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Core Creek Militia

==============================My sixth great grandfather, his wife, and five of his six children were killed in battle with the Tuscarora Indians at Core Creek, NC.

The Seven Blackbirds

==============================My third great grandfather was an Ensign in the Revolutionary War, and saved his unit's flag after being wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also at Kingston (Kinston), Wilmington, Charleston, Two Sisters and Augusta. He was at the defeat at Brier Creek and also Bee Creek.

Requiem Aeternam -
Eternal Rest Grant unto Them
==============================
My second great grandfather was killed in action on May 3, 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
=============================
My great grandfather and great uncle knew all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending Fort Mahone. (Fort Mahone was named "Fort Damnation" by the Yankees) *Handpicked men of the 53rd (My great grandfather was one of these) made the final, night assault at Petersburg in an attempt to break Grant's line. This was against Fort Stedman which was a few miles to the slight northeast. They initially succeeded, but reinforcements drove them back. This video is made from photographs which were taken the day after the 53rd evacuated the lines the night before to begin the retreat to Appomattox. I have many more pictures taken by the same photographer, one of these shows a 14 year old boy and the other is the famous picture of the blond, handsome soldier with his musket.
===========================
*General Gordon promised the men a gold medal and 30 days leave if they accomplished their task and many years after the War my great grandfather wrote General Gordon, who was then governor of Georgia about this incident. They exchanged several letters which I have framed. See first link below.
===========================
*The Attack On Fort Stedman
============================
"His Colored Friends"
============================
Lee's Surrender
=============================
My Black NC Kinfolks
============================
Punished For Being Caught!

Great Grandfather Koonce

He was a drummer boy in the WBTS, survived the War only to die a few years later. He was caught in an ice storm on his way home, but instead of seeking shelter, continued on his horse until the end. His clothes had to be cut off and he died a few days later.